Presence in A Moment in Time

A bright open sky

Filled with stars

Quiet and warm

Wandering

Feeling light

Feeling peace

A majestic tree

Standing in the night

Mysterious

A voice rising in the air

A glowing moon

Eternal silence

An open mind

An open heart

Ticking

A moment in time

This moment in time happened in Japan in the fall of 2019, while traveling with my Reiki teacher, Frans Stiene, and a group of Reiki practitioners.

Our sixteen-day journey was an opportunity to explore the system of Reiki within its original cultural environment. We had a full itinerary, but there was also room for spontaneous discoveries. One of those unexpected moments happened one evening in Atami, at Kinomiya Shrine.

Our teacher had discovered the shrine earlier that day. At night, it was illuminated by hundreds of lanterns. It was also the night of a full moon.

Our group separated for a while, allowing each person to wander at their own pace. We were the only visitors. The air was warm, the moon was bright, and everything felt quiet and peaceful.

We followed different paths around the shrine until, at some point, several of us found ourselves together near a giant camphor tree. The tree seemed ancient, deeply rooted, and somehow at home in that place.

We sat on the few empty benches in front of it.

No one spoke.

Then, from somewhere in the stillness, a soft voice began to chant.

At that moment, something shifted.

Time seemed to suspend itself.

In the stillness, I felt my heart open with an overwhelming sense of peace and wholeness. Tears filled my eyes. There was nothing I needed to understand or accomplish. For a moment, there was simply the experience of being completely present.

The moon, the stars, the tree, the chanting, the warmth of the night, the shrine, and the people sitting together seemed to belong to one experience.

A moment in time felt spacious enough to hold everything.

Eventually, the group began to move again. Time was ticking. We returned to the hotel, and I went to sleep without trying to make sense of what had happened.

A few days later, I shared the experience with my teacher and with the friend who had been chanting that night.

I had wondered whether there was something I was supposed to understand about the experience—the sacredness of the place, the tree, the moon, the stars, the chanting, the gathering of the group. Perhaps I needed to learn the Heart Sutra, which my friend had chanted so beautifully.

But over time, I came to see that perhaps there was nothing to figure out.

The experience itself was enough.

It stayed with me, not as a memory I needed to recreate, but as a quiet sense of wholeness that occasionally returns.

For a long time, I tried not to hold on to it. I thought perhaps I needed to let it go, or even forget it. But gradually I understood that there was nothing to let go of.

I could simply allow the memory to be there.

And perhaps this is something practice continually teaches us: we do not need to grasp a particular experience for it to have meaning.

A moment comes.

We meet it.

We experience it.

And we let it move on.

This brings me back to the words “For today only.”

The first words of each of the Reiki Precepts are also an invitation to return to the immediacy of experience:

For today only, do not anger.

For today only, do not worry.

For today only, be grateful.

For today only, be true to yourself and your being.

For today only, be compassionate to yourself and others.

“For today only” brings us back from abstraction into the moment that is actually here.

Not yesterday.

Not tomorrow.

Not the life we think we should be living.

This moment.

And this moment is not insignificant simply because it is ordinary.

Sometimes, sitting beneath a great tree on a full-moon night, listening to someone chant, we may experience this directly. At other times, the moment may be much less dramatic: washing dishes, sitting quietly, listening to another person, feeling our breath, placing our hands on our body.

The practice is not to wait for extraordinary moments.

It is to learn to meet this moment.

When we practice in this way, we may begin to experience something that is difficult to explain intellectually: the boundaries we normally place between ourselves and the world can become less rigid.

We notice that we are always participating in something larger than ourselves.

The breath connects us to the world.

Our attention shapes how we meet it.

Our choices affect others.

Our presence becomes part of our relationships.

Perhaps this is one way of understanding the teaching that the universe is in me and I am in the universe. It does not have to remain an idea to be believed. It can become something we encounter through practice, as a felt sense of belonging, connection, and wholeness.

We don't have to hold on to that experience.

We don't have to reproduce it.

We don't even have to fully understand it.

We can simply allow the awareness to inform how we live.

For today only.

In each moment, we have the opportunity to return to presence.

To notice what is here.

To meet ourselves honestly.

To soften our reactivity.

To cultivate gratitude.

To remain open.

To act with compassion.

A moment in time may be brief, but when we are fully present, we may discover that it is not separate from the whole of our life.

Perhaps this is what practice offers us: not an escape from ordinary time, but a way of inhabiting it more completely.

For today only, there is nowhere else we need to be.

“When we see human life only in terms of ordinary time, where everything is chopped into separate pieces, then your eyes are not open to see life in terms of universal time, when we are interconnected and interpenetrated with all sentient beings.”— Dainin Katagiri, Each Moment Is the Universe

For more information about Kinomiya Shrine and O-Kusu, the Holy Tree, please visit this website https://livejapan.com/en/in-tokyo/in-pref-shizuoka/in-atami/article-a0000582/

For any questions about Reiki practice, classes, and upcoming events, please contact Veronique Frede at moonstonesanctuary@gmail.com or visit our website at www.moonstonesanctuary.com